Bangalore-ed!

My resolution to be more dilligent with blogging doesn't seem to be working well. Ditto for weekend travels and photo shoots for atleast the first half of the year. Except for a late night shoot on Bangalore roads from 11 p.m after a half day team outing where super enthusiastic office folks insisted on playing a knock out cricket tournament. Times like this I wonder if I were a sadist.

Work on weekdays more than compensates for the lack of significant activity over the weekends though. Of all the quirky emoticons on Sametime messenger, I particularly fell for this one:

What I did manage to do,however,is to plan my trip of the year. I am off to Ladakh again in August, this time for a trek to Chamser Kangri situated near Tso Moriri coupled with plans to do a Leh Manali roadtrip. Didn't imagine I would be going back to Ladakh again this soon!

Also, gradually realizing I am pretty hooked to Bangalore.Love the superb weather, the prospective eating out options (several of them still remain unexplored) and the general enthusiastic junta up for travel or photography. Great options to catch up with theater at Rangashankara. I did manage to catch a play -The interview; well executed with brilliant comic timing.

Traffic is bad, but so is the story for every other Indian city. Staying close to office helps.I am generally flummoxed with a lot of Bangalore traffic signals at crossings though, or maybe it is just the naivette of a novice driver speaking.I also managed to lose my way driving back from Forum to home (eeks! horrid sense of direction). Absolutely hate the night curfew, what with pubs and restaurants closing down at 11 p.m. Also, the perils of going through the breathalyzer test if you are driving back at night forced me to settle for a single pina colada when I caught up with a friend at a nice pub over the weekend .Reasons why I prefer my house serving up as the team party place on occasional weekends:-)!

The good life

“Wine is bottled poetry” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. The Bangalore International Wine festival seemed like it chose to differ. A couple of us dropped by at the wine festival on an unusually hot Sunday afternoon hoping to catch some interesting photo ops. The “eclectic” event was a mish mash of food stalls (the ubiquitous CCD kinds),wine sampling events (where some sloshed visitors looked like they would leave no stone unturned in extracting the last penny of their visitor passes) and a.. err.. rock music show. Now I love rock, but a wine festival and rock music? Or maybe that was eclectic.

The British government added sparkling wine to it’s Consumer Price Index market basket of goods this month. “Sparkling wines are also being added due to their increased consumption” – added an official note. A case of a luxury good becoming a normal good? Flummoxed…eh? Rare occasions when I would want to gloat about the economist in me but shall spare you in peace. A luxury good, non technically speaking is what the poor cannot have and only the elite can. The funny thing about a luxury good is however, once it gets increasingly democratised, it ceases being one. Technology is a very good example. Even before you know it, that hottest gadget you got for yourself becomes a normal good. So much for social signalling!

So what does it take to know how hard it is to be immensely rich these days? Check out the Forbes' "Cost of Living Extremely Well Index". Its components include: Gucci loafers, one year at Harvard University, a night at a one-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons in New York, 1oz of Joy (a perfume by Jean Patou), Davidoff cigars, a Hermès calfskin bag and much more. Also, what matters is not just the good itself but under what brand it is being sold.

Recent research also suggests that luxury brands act like marketing placebos and could improve human performance! Think your photography ain’t good enough…maybe you should get the Canon EOS 5D Mark II!! (macro man fits the bill , Alleppey fellow travellers would agree:-0)). For those not so inflicted by such fallacies of human thought, there is always the inhouse photography expert..or better..a pirated version of photoshop:D. Okay photographers,we will debate on the “moralities” of photo editing next time!

Photo credits:Shireen

Of Milieu and Music

The Flying Bulls aerobatic team whizzed overhead in their ZLIN 50 LX aircrafts , did a dare devilish looping in an inverted G, leaving the crowd below gasping in awe. The sun was beating upon us harshly. The breathtaking aerobatic antics nothwitstanding , Aneesha and I were still wondering if the largest Aero show in Asia was worth it's salt. The brave woman also stood in a queue for 3 hours to sit in the cockpit of an Eurofighter typhoon. I had already given up by then. We had started early in the morning to reach the Yelahanka Air force station. Even discounting for the heavy weekend traffic towards the air force station, the parking arrangements were a mess. The “shuttles” supposed to transfer visitors from the parking lot to the aero show venue were nowhere to be seen. Unlike more dilligent visitors like us who read through the aero show website clearly laying down instructions not to carry handbags for security reasons, the milling crowd around us ( a lot of them who later gatecrashed without a valid pass!) were let through with all kinds of bags with a cursory check. Inside the venue itself, the organisers definitely had civilian convenience at the bottom of their list , or maybe in an asterisk somewhere.My two cents on the whole circus affair:

1. Anyone coming to the largest aero show in Asia would expect a minimum standard of organizing, not childhood nostalgia of visiting town fairs ( the latter also had cheap food by the way)
2. If you do not want civilians to come, please say so.Don't ask us to pay for “business visitor” passes (what were they exactly?), lay down a whole lot of rules starting from what to carry and what to wear and make a sham of it at the end of the day.
3. Yes I liked your aircrafts, their antics and the men in jumpsuits ( Oh and the top gun music). Next time, I will watch your trapeze acts on TV (and suggest everyone do).

The Bryan Adams concert at the Palace Grounds was a relief in comparison. Long queues, huge crowds, but well managed and no unpleasant surprises. Adams's voice, age nothwitstanding and his guitarist Keith Scott had the crowds up on their feet to every number they belted out. The fledgling rockstars in my team gave tough competition, crooning away to glory untill we asked them to shut up. Completely loved the pulsating vibes of a 90 minutes high octane performance, definitely worth the wait and the money. The only glitch for the evening was lack of dinner options post 11 p.m in the city and hence a mad dash to catch the last order at McDonalds on the way back home. Thank God for the little mercies of Mcgrills!!:)

A night on the rocks

The lights of the town below were lit up like a giant UFO.We stood resting against one of the rocks. The climb was steep and the maze of shrubs and the boulder like walls were intriguing in the flickering light of our torches. The trek started in the night much later than anticipated, thanks to the cops who refused to let us proceed to Papagni Mutt (the trekking base) despite much haggling. My attempts to find an alternative route on google only revealed that post 12 is a bad time to proceed to the base because of the patrolling cops, inviting groans of disappointment from my team.We had reluctantly turned around but bumped into a guide who agreed to take us via an alternative route. We left our bus asking the driver to pick us up in the morning from the base and left off silently with the guide through the fields.

Skandagiri, also known as Kalavar Betta is an ancient mountain fortress located near Bangalore at an altitude of 1350m. Dilapidated remains of Tipu's fort can be found on the top. History says this was a small but strong hill fort. It surrendered to British troops in 1791 and remained in British hands until the peace treaty of 1792, which ended the third Anglo-Mysore war.

The trek is a literal teaser. Just when you think you have reached the top, there is another stone wall towering just beyond. Short but exciting,we had to stop occassionally against the rock ledges (not to mention my shameless dumping over the tripod to Karteek and the undesirable effects of mixing drinks on our young intern).

We reached the summit at around 4 a.m,two hours after we started the trek. The wind was blowing relentlessly and the bone chilling cold left us shivering for cover.Luckily for the trekkers, there is a small shop which sells hot chai and maggi and arranges for a bonfire as well, predictably doing brisk business.We gathered around the bonfire to beat the cold, waiting for the sunrise. Around dawn, a few mist covered peaks in the distance come into view. Like piles of cotton candy the clouds play with the wind, finally giving way to the small orange ball in the horizon. The magical view lasts for sometime before the fog clears up for a bright day.We descended soon after and left back for Bangalore. My first trek of the year was over,hoping to catch up with some more before it ends!

Written in Stone

Folk legend has it that a giant named Hidimbasura lived on the Chitradurga hills. When the Pandavas came with their mother Kunti during their exile, Bhima had a duel with Hidimba who was slain and peace returned to the area. Located amidst these hills is the Chitradurga fort . Built by the feudal lords of the Vijaynagar empire and later captured by Hyder Ali in 1779, the fort stands as a grand stone edifice encircled by seven circular walls.

It was a November morning and unlike most weekends I had to drag myself out of bed a tad too early. The photography clubs from B1 and B2 were off for a day trip to the Chitradurga fort. After the cursory delay of getting all the half awake photographers together, both the buses left the city and sped off on the Bangalore Pune highway. Save a few stops on the way to catch breakfast , and to pick up a lens from Sid (not to mention the attempt to abduct him) , the journey was uneventful. The more awake B1 folks managed to entertain themselves through the bus journey,while the B2 bus was a sleeping graveyard.

We reached Chitradurga around noon and made our way through the fort. The guide we had (unfortunately) hired turned out to be a dictator of some sorts, insisting on undivided attention leaving us running for cover.The boulder strewn landscape around Chitradurga is embellished with watchtowers, temples,bastions and fortifications all around. No wonder that the fort is also known as “Kallina Kote” or the “Place of stone fort”. There are 28 entrances, a palace, 19 gateways, granaries,50 warehouses and water tanks inside the fort.

An interesting story surrounds a small opening in the rocks in the fort. During the siege of the fort , Hyder Ali came upon a clever plan to send his soldiers through the opening in the rocks. The guard on duty near the hole had gone home for lunch and his wife,Obawa,noticed the soldiers emerging out of the opening. She killed the soldiers one by one with her wooden club (“Onake”). In the ensuing battle , the fort of Chitradurga was lost to Hyder Ali , but the opening in the rocks still remains a witness to the legend of ‘Onake Obawa’.

The temples served up as interesting photo-ops for the photographers. Puja is still conducted at some of these ancient temples. The bored priests break off into a smile as we tried to click them. We also hiked around in groups to the hilltops which provide a stunning view of the surrounding area. By evening , we had finished off our tour and boarded our buses to return to Bangalore. The 15th century fortress lay behind , seeped in stories and legends of it’s own.

Not to miss at the Chitradurga fort:
Watch the ‘monkey man’ Jyothi Raja scale the fort walls with effortless ease. A passionate rock climber, Raja is a regular at the fort precincts and has garnered a huge fan following for his unique rock climbing skills



The reading backlog

“Please return all mail I recieve to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again , I want you to know you are a good man. I now walk into the wild. Alex.”

In April 1992 , a young man named Christopher Johnson McCandless from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness, never to return again. Author Jon Krakauer chronicles the story of this enigmatic young man in his book “Into The Wild”. I had picked this up on my way to Ladakh at the Bangalore Airport.The book,however,remained unread through the trip, packed off in a fellow trekker's backpack.Thanks to my incurable habit of picking up books every now and then (airports being an old favourite), I have accumulated a huge reading backlog ever since, something I have been trying to finish off during the past couple of weekends.

Krakauer's book raises some intriguing questions – what differentiates adventure from bravado,and how far would one go in search of raw, transcendent experience? A tryst with the unknown holds a seduction of it's own , and anyone with a passion for adventure can vouch for it. Krakauer relates it to his own climbing experiences , and a personal obsession to climb one of Alaska's remotest mountains – the Devil's Thumb that had overtaken him during his youth. He explores McCandless's personality almost with a personal vigour. An extremely intelligent and idealistic young man , captivated by the writings of Tolstoy, McCandless's strained relationship with his father pushed him into seeking refuge in his undisciplined imagination - a strange obsession to experience living off the wilderness in Alaska. Surprisingly , his encounters with others on his journey to Alaska reveal a more grounded side of his personality and the fact that he held no illusions around his venture into the wild. In fact , as the author delves deeper into the youngster's last few days in the Alaskan wilderness, what surfaces is that save for some insignificant blunders, McCandless would have walked out of the Alaskan woods in 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into it.

A somewhat dark read , a deep exploration of a very enigmatic personality and thought provoking questions around the limits of climbing as a sport ( which as the author himself puts it , becomes a 'psycho neurotic' tendency for some of the most obsessive climbers, an attempt to frame the torment of their own existence).

On a more cheerful note, I moved on to Michael Palin's ' Himalaya' , a day to day account of the BBC documentary series by the same name. Palin gives a befitting introduction -“ What the Sahara is to desert, the Himalayas is to mountains. Both share the same contradictory attractions, appealing and appalling, tempting and terrifying in equal, and ultimately irresistible,measure.”  He traverses the Himalaya from the Khyber Pass, through Ladakh and Kashmir,enters Nepal and the mystic land of Tibet and concludes the grand journey in the Bay of Bengal - “ Mission accomplished. With the help of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra I'm swept away out into the Bay of Bengal , along with millions of tonnes of mud that was once the Himalaya”

Palin's first hand account of his experiences in the subcontinent are earnest – his predicament while filling a permit to buy alcohol in Rawalpindi which among other things , requires him to give his religion (“Agnostic with doubts”), his pleasure on discovering the many facets of Hindu mythology in Krishna's temple in Kathmandu (“Our gods don't tend to have girlfriends. It's something we've rather missed out on”) or his admiration for Wongchu,the Sherpa leader who accompanies him to Annapurna Base Camp (“ He is horrendously over-qualified for this sort of work, having twice summitted Everest. On one of those occasions he arrived at the top at 5.30 in the morning, so far ahead of the rest of the party that he lay down on top of Everest and fell asleep until they arrived. Now that is cool!”). The unmistakable attraction of the Himalaya lingers all through, and photographs by Basil Pao do justice to the captivating accounts. A thoroughly enjoyable travelogue, deja-vu for anyone who has travelled to the Himalays, highly recommended!

My reading backlog still continues though, am hoping to bridge more of the pile of unread books on my shelf  before the year ends:)

The Eclectic Getaway

“Kochi, Kerala’s Friendly Gateway, Is No Backwater” read the article on New York Times travel. I was sifting through google trying to figure out a destination for the long weekend around Independence Day. Explicit instructions from M just said “No beach , please!”. The woman elegantly went incommunicado after that and no amount of hounding over phone calls or emails helped. The responsibility of looking for a destination was thus successfully delegated to me , the sole back up plan being hanging out at Hard Rock Cafe in Bangalore for all the three days. The snake boat race in Alleppey around the same time was an option , but I had already been there same time last year. The idea of Fort Cochin seemed like a good fit – I had briefly passed through Jew town on my way back to Bangalore from Alleppey after the snake boat race. I badly wanted to catch a Kathakali dance performance and M could get her first glimpse of the backwaters too – our two main agendas were ticked!

Fort Kochi was the territory that was granted by the Rajah of Kochi to the Portugese , later captured by the Dutch and finally by the British. There is a distinct colonial air around the place, be it the ancient architecture of the churches or the elegantly built boutique hotels on the waterfront , some restored from heritage buildings. The place is also a backpacker's retreat and tell tale signs are everywhere – affordable homestays (the one where we stayed ,bang opposite the St Francis Church claimed to be the last residence of Vasco Da Gama till his death and burial in the same church ), flea markets lined across the streets and small cafes tucked around the corners in the local neighbourhoods.

We reached Fort Kochi on Friday afternoon and decided to catch a Kathakali performance in the evening at the Kerala Kathakali Centre. We got in early to catch a glimpse of the elaborate make up process before the actual performance. The show begins with a demonstration of the main facial expressions used in Kathakali. The experience of  watching a Kathakali performance is a fascinating one -a vibrant medley of dance, mime, music and acting. Expressions so vivid that we were left to wonder how is it humanely possible to practice and perform such an art form! An enthralling 3 hours later we headed off for dinner and back to the venerable Vasco's home . Despite much speculation around the apparition of the Portugese explorer , the night went away uneventfully. Vasco probably decided against a rendezvous with the two not-so-sane women:).

Early next morning we headed off to Kumarakom. Situated on the banks of the Vembanad Lake (the longest lake in India), Kumarakom is a beautiful backwater destination.The cruise took us through an intricate network of canals and lagoons lined with lush, green paddy fields, finally ending in the Vembanad Lake. The boat stood still in the endless expanse of the lake, and the gently flowing breeze put us into the throes of the most heavenly sleep ever. Vembanad  deservedly earned it's place on my list of favourite places to snooze*!

We reached back Fort Kochi in time to catch the sunset along the waterfront and the postcard Chinese fishing nets. Plenty of fish mongers were still open in the evening , selling fresh snapper, prawns or crabs which can be served grilled to your liking ( for those with a strong penchant for the piscean variety , it may also take some effort to steal your glance away from the fish glistening under the light of the lantern). We wandered around in the quiet streets for sometime,whiled time over coffee and headed off for dinner to the Koder House. The Koder House is the former residence of one of the city's most prominent Jewish families , now a heritage building and an all suite hotel. Menorah , the restaurant serves authentic Jewish, Syrian Christian and Kerala cuisine with a wonderful ambience to unwind. A thoroughly enjoyable dinner later (not to mention M's interesting conversations with the waiter after her glass of beer) ,we headed back to the homestay.

We checked out the next morning , left our bags at the homestay and decided to cover Jew town and the Dutch palace before heading back to Bangalore. Jew Town is situated in Mattancheri , a 10 minute auto rickshaw ride away. The oldest synagogue in India , built in 1568, is located here. Old , handpainted Chinese tiles decorate the entire synagogue which also has Hebrew inscriptions on the walls. The narrow alleyways around the synagogue are lined with shops selling artifacts and antiques, some owned by the handful of Jews who still stay there. Nearby is the Dutch palace , which was presented to the Cochin rajas by the Portugese. The highlight of the palace are the beautifully painted Hindu murals depicting the entire story of the Ramayana. We headed back to pick up our bags , and with an hour still in hand , decided to spend some time in the St Francis Church.It was empty and quiet inside ,except for gospel songs, being rehearsed by the church coir. The oldest European church in the country briefly held the remains of Vasco Da Gama before it was sent back to Portugal. We sat in silence as the gospel songs echoed in the centuries old church (I am tempted to add the church as well to the my list of soporific favorites save someone sue me for blasphemy). An hour later we headed off to the airport to catch our flight back to Bangalore. The holiday to the Queen of the Arabian sea was over – a tete-a-tete with eclectic culture, the lovely backwaters and plain good times with an old friend:).

*Others in the list include the tempo traveller single seat , the soft grassy, ground beneath a particular tree in Vaxholm and my sleeping bag in Ladakh.